Ex-Fox News Host Chirps Ben Shapiro For Saying He Won’t Give Up His AR-15

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Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson condemned Ben Shapiro for declaring he would not give up his assault-style rifle following renewed calls for a ban.

“Ordinary people didn’t have AR-15s before 2004,” Carlson tweeted. “They’re not some time-honored American tradition, they’re a recent mistake that we could fix and save thousands of lives in the process.”

On his Daily Wire show, Shapiro acknowledged the “lives destroyed” by last week’s mass shooting in Maine that left 18 dead and scores of others injured. The gunman, whose signs of mental illness were reportedly missed by authorities, was pictured on surveillance video aiming an assault-style rifle. Rumblings of support for a new ban began shortly thereafter.

Shapiro claimed that an uptick in antisemitism due to the Israel-Hamas war was proof that more people, especially Jews, should carry weapons.

“So, no, I’m not going to be giving up my AR-15 because a mentally-ill person, who never should have had weapons, committed a heinous act of evil,” Shapiro said.

But Carlson’s claim that “Ordinary people didn’t have AR-15s before 2004” didn’t exactly ring true.

According to Ohio Capital Journal, a sweeping bi-partisan crime bill was signed into law in 1994 by then-President Clinton, but the ban was limited, covering “only certain categories of semi-automatic weapons such as AR-15s and applied to a ban on sales only after the act was signed into law, allowing people to keep hold of weapons purchased before that date. And it also had in it a so-called ‘sunset provision’ that allowed the ban to expire in 2004.”

That meant that people who bought semi-automatic rifles before the ban took effect in 1994 still had them afterward.

When the ban expired in 2004, Americans were once again able to legally purchase assault-style rifles.

Carlson was correct when she postulated that “we could fix and save thousands of lives” if a ban were back in place, according to Capital Journal. Data showed “an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.”

Conversely, the data showed that the United States was, in fact, a safer place between 1994-2004 when “the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down.”